C. S. Lewis in Context

Doris T. Myers

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612771960
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Although C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) achieved a level of popularity as a fiction writer, literary scholars have tended to view him as a minor figure working in an insignificant genre-science fiction-or have pigeonholed him as a Christian apologist and moralist. In C. S. Lewis in Context, Doris T. Myers places his work in the literary milieu of his times and the public context of language rather than in the private realm of personal habits or relationships. A central debate early in the 20th century concerned the nature of language: was it primarily objective and empirical, as Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards argued in The Meaning of Meaning, or essentially metaphorical and impressionistic, the approach of Owen Garfield in Poetic Diction? Lewis espoused the latter theory and integrated it into the purpose and style of his fiction. Myers therefore argues that he was not "out of touch with his time: ' as some critics claim, but a 20th-century literary figure engaged in the issues of his day. New readings of many of Lewis's best known works reflect this linguistic approach. For example, Myers analyzes The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) in terms of a distinction between archetypal and individual metaphor to highlight the work's strengths and weaknesses. Instead of interpreting That Hideous Strength (1945) conventionally as a defense of Christianity, she reformulates the debate as that of language the facilitator of rule versus language the instrument of tyranny. She also draws a new parallel between the Chronicles of Narnia and Spenser's Faerie Queen, showing that they are modeled on similar heroic ideals and narrative technique. Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and Till We Have Faces (1956) are discussed in a new light as well. By approaching Lewis's fiction through the linguistic controversies of his day, Myers not only develops a new framework within which to evaluate his works, but also clarifies his literary contributions. This valuable study will appeal to literary and linguistic scholars as well as to general enthusiasts of Lewis's fiction.

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THE CONTEXT OF METAPHOR

AS PHILOSOPHER Wilbur M. Urban has pointed out, each turning point in Occidental history has been marked by intense concern about the nature of language. Every time such a period occurs, there are what he calls high and low evaluations of language. The high evaluation involves a belief in the reality of universals and connects the word closely with the thing it designates. It identifies reason with the Word, the Logos, and is therefore closely connected with the Greek-Christian tradition. The low evaluation involves some form of nominalism and detaches the word from the thing. It is the characteristic underlying assumption of all periods of empiricism, and Urban calls it the “beginning of skepticism” (21–24).¹ The period after World War I was just such a turning point in human history, and the old battle between the high and low evaluations of language was fought out anew, with new justifications, new combatants, and new applications of abstract theory to real-life issues.

C. S. Lewis was involved in this struggle. In the process of reaching an informed, intellectually based decision to embrace Christianity, he had to decide how to evaluate language. One common criticism of Lewis is that he dealt with the struggles of the twentieth century by ignoring them,² but this observation is at best only half true. Once Lewis had made up his mind that many modern assumptions, especially those about language, were wrong, he naturally did not promote them; nevertheless, all his fiction is influenced by, and responds to, twentieth-century issues, especially language issues. Lewis’s first work of fiction, The Pilgrim’s Regress, was, among other things, a response to the modern controversy over the nature of language.

Any discussion of this controversy must of necessity be sketchy and tentative, for there are simply too many subtleties, too many unknowns, too many complex relationships for definitive treatment. Even a limited discussion, however, can provide new insight into The Pilgrim’s Regress, and indeed all of Lewis’s fiction.

Certainly the postwar period was very much dominated by the low evaluation of language, both in intellectual and practical realms. In the intellectual realm it is easy to point to the twentieth-century fruition of nineteenth-century Darwinian naturalism; to the development of twentieth-century linguistics (much influenced by behaviorism) from nineteenth-century philology; to Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism, which contributed to twentieth-century logical positivism, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1918), which led to the whole movement known as linguistic philosophy with its credo “All philosophy is a critique of language.”³ But intellectual movements such as these do not have much effect on literature, or life in general, unless they answer some deeply felt, nonintellectual need.

In postwar society at large this need was reflected in a widespread conviction that people had been duped by language into sacrificing themselves and their well-being in the war. There is no doubt that World War I caused people to look at language in a new way. More than at any previous time in history, World War I was fought with language as well as weaponry. Although the propaganda methods were unsophisticated compared with those used in World War II, the communications media were more pervasive and invasive than they had been in previous wars. There was no radio or television, but the available media—newspapers, posters, books, pamphlets, pictures, maps, songs, and lantern slides (Roetter 33–34; John Williams 26)—were used to the fullest. Horatio Bottomley’s weekly newspaper, John Bull, was especially effective among the working and lower-middle classes, and citizens on all levels were perhaps more dependent on public information than in previous times. Furthermore, the military need for propaganda, for the mobilization of public opinion, was greater than it had ever been before. Young men had to be persuaded to volunteer for military service, since there was no universal conscription until 1916. Civilians had to be persuaded to replace the fighters in factories and fields, to control their consumption of alcohol, to eat less bread. Young women were urged to promote the war effort by refusing to go out with able-bodied men in civilian dress (John Williams 190, 62–63, 55).

From a post-Vietnam perspective, the wartime idealism and excitement seem almost unimaginable. Religious as well as social sanctions were invoked. When Prime Minister Asquith said “The conflict … is not merely a material but a spiritual one,” the Church of England backed him up (John Williams 26, 17). H. G. Wells idealistically called the conflict “the war to end war” and became excited enough to lay aside his agnosticism; his Mr. Britling Sees It Through was his first (and last) book espousing belief in God. The newspapers whipped up the excitement generated in other quarters. Unreliable as a source of hard news, these papers circulated wild rumors that promoted false optimism and glamorized the fighting (John Williams 127). England was drunk on words, set up for the postwar hangover. C. E. Montague’s postwar book, significantly entitled Disenchantment, expressed the prevailing mood of the morning after: “The only new thing about deception in war is modern man’s more perfect means for its practice.”⁴ Lewis’s often-noted refusal to read newspapers suggests that he shared the postwar disillusionment with language that replaced public idealism and excitement.

Literary language also played a part in leading young men to their deaths. Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, demonstrates that the language of the trenches was literary. He notes that World War I occurred at a time when “two ‘liberal’ forces were powerfully coinciding in England”—the first a conviction of the value of classical and English literature, and the second a rage for popular education and self-improvement (157). Young men were asked to suffer death (poetically called “sacrifice”) according to the rhetoric of boys’ books, male romances, and pseudomedieval fiction. Fussell mentions especially George Alfred Henty, Rider Haggard, the poems of Robert Bridges, and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (21). Almost every literate man had read William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End—C. S. Lewis was reading it in 1917 just before he went into the army—and saw Mametz Wood, Trones Wood, and High Wood in terms of Morris’s Wood Debateable and Wood Perilous (Fussell 135–37).

After the war, many of the survivors concluded that they had been betrayed by noble language. A quotation from Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland), was a focus for their disillusionment. Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” though written during the war, is the most famous expression of the betrayal. Owen counters the civilian view of the glory of warfare with images of muddy trenches, artillery fire, and poison gas, telling the noncombatant that if he could see the reality of a man drowning in poison gas,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori. (11. 25–28).

Ezra Pound scathingly quotes the same sentence in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”:

Died some, pro patria,

non “dulce” non “et decor”…

walked eye-deep in hell

believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving

came home, home to a lie. (Espey 121)

The postwar disillusionment with the traditional language of glory and valor gave strength to the low views of language which would have developed in any case as a response to the intellectual movements of the nineteenth century. The war simply made it more urgent to reevaluate the nature of language, to find out what had made “the old Lie” look so plausible.

The Meaning of Meaning and Poetic Diction

One of the most influential studies of language in this direction was The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. Like Owen and Pound, Ogden and Richards see World War I as an extreme example of the tyranny of language and concern themselves with building a theory of language that will get rid of traditional philosophic and religious assumptions about it. They hold to a low evaluation of language. For students of C. S. Lewis, The Meaning of Meaning is usefully considered in conjunction with Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1926), which espouses a high evaluation of language. As Barfield explains in the preface to the second edition (1952), he did not originally intend his book to be an answer to Ogden and Richards (15). Nevertheless, the contrast between the two books provides an insight into the intellectual context of Lewis’s fiction, for in it Lewis defends a view similar to Barfield’s and reacts against the view of Ogden and Richards.⁵

Like others who hold to a low evaluation of language, Ogden and Richards believe that mankind has always been hampered by language superstition, which they define as the erroneous view “that words … always imply things corresponding to them” (31). The seemingly sophisticated philosophy of the ancient Greeks is based on their misconception that language has some necessary relationship to the structure of reality. Out of this misconception they created “the World of Being, in which bogus entities reside” (32). Although language superstition has always been a problem, twentieth-century advances in the technology of communication have made it more dangerous by disseminating more linguistic confusion (29).

In order to combat language superstition and get rid of the bogus entities, Ogden and Richards formulate a theory of meaning in terms of Watson’s behaviorism (Wolf 86–87). An external object causes a sensation—the modification of a sense organ; repeated encounters with the object will produce similar sensations, and gradually the connection between “symbol” (word) and “referent” (object) will be established by a process similar to the one by which the dinner bell came to have meaning for Pavlov’s dogs (Ogden and Richards 53, 56–57).⁶ This behaviorist formulation eliminates “the primitive idea that Words and Things are related by some magic bond” (47), which leads to the use of symbols that have no referent. The empty use of language leads to the creation of bogus entities and what Ogden and Richards refer to as psittacism (the parrot disease), the inability to free oneself from catchphrases (217–18).

Their theory of metaphor is an extension of this behaviorist formulation. They assert that a metaphor arises when a speaker abstracts similarities between something physical and some other thing. An alternate definition is that metaphor occurs when the properties of a referent within one universe of discourse are applied to another universe of discourse.⁷ Both of these definitions imply that metaphor is an especially complex kind of abstraction. Indeed, Ogden and Richards state that educated people use metaphor easily while “very simple folk” have small vocabularies based on concrete experience and do not use metaphors (213–14).⁸ In a chapter entitled “The Canons of Symbolism” they set up rules for classifying referents and making sure that each symbol stands for only one referent. Since metaphor by definition refers to more than one thing, it belongs only to poetic, emotional, and nonreferential discourse.

This description of how language is or should be used seems counterintuitive, but with it Ogden and Richards propose to exhibit the sources of linguistic confusion and free mankind from language-based irrationality. They do not explicitly state that their method will replace religion, but they do occasionally use salvation rhetoric, as in the assertion that their approach will “free” us from metaphysicians and bishops and “restore our faith” in physicists (83–84).

Busy with the studies that won honors degrees in philosophy, classics, and English, Lewis may not have read The Meaning of Meaning at the time of its first publication in 1923. Indeed, his postwar disillusionment was declining by then. As he recalls in Surprised by Joy, when he returned to Oxford in 1919 he worked to become “a realist,” assuming what he calls his “New Look.” His realism was chiefly characterized by the determination “never … to be taken in again” (204). It probably did not involve an explicit abandonment of the high evaluation of language inherent in his classical education; indeed, Ogden and Richards would have regarded his Hegelianism as riddled with bogus entities. Lewis’s shaky hold on his New Look was threatened when Owen Barfield, his closest friend, became involved in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. As Lewis remarks in Surprised by Joy, “here [in anthroposophy] was everything which the New Look had been designed to exclude” (206). He and Barfield began to engage in an “incessant discussion” of philosophy, “sometimes by letter and sometimes face to face,” which they called “the Great War” (207). Lionel Adey, who has examined the surviving documents of “the Great War” in detail, says that Lewis especially objected to the idea that truth could be grasped by the imagination, to the blurring of the distinction between the real and the imagined, and to Steiner’s system of exercises for training one’s intuition (Adey 30–31, 51).

Although Lewis could never follow Barfield into anthroposophy, “the Great War” was influential in forcing him to “take that look off [his] face” (Surprised by Joy 217)—that is, to give up his hard-edged realism. The chronology suggests the extent of the influence. According to Adey, Barfield first became interested in Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy in 1923 (12–13); meanwhile, Lewis’s temporary appointment as a philosophy tutor in 1923–24 forced him to reevaluate his “watered Hegelianism” for tutorial purposes (Surprised by Joy 222). Barfield began drafting Poetic Diction in 1924–25, and the bulk of the “Great War” letters were written in 1925–27 (Adey 12–13). As can be seen in his mature writings, Lewis ultimately adopted most of Barfield’s theory of language while rejecting its basis in anthroposophy. In Surprised by Joy he says, “Much of the thought which he [Barfield] put into Poetic Diction had already become mine before that important little book appeared” (200).

Barfield’s whole theory of language is opposed to that of Ogden and Richards.⁹ Instead of viewing the human being as a passive recipient of sensory stimuli, he sees the mind as an active participant in the very nature of the universe. And instead of regarding metaphor as an abstraction, something added on to more precise, more basic expressions, he regards it as the source of both language and knowledge.

As an anthroposophist, Barfield believes that there is a cosmic Intelligence which is gradually becoming visibly incarnate in human intelligence. A person who is thinking is participating in this cosmic Intelligence. Raw sensory data do not constitute knowledge, or even mental activity; “the pure sense-datum” (48) is merely the percept, meaningless in itself. In order for cognition to occur, the percept must be synthesized with the concept, which Barfield defines as “what I bring to the sense-datum from within” (55). The act of cognition, the synthesis of percept and concept, “creates” the world we experience. His formulation is, of course, reminiscent of Coleridge’s primary and secondary imagination, Shelley’s understanding of metaphor, the philosophy of the American Transcendentalists, and ultimately Plato.

It is not surprising, then, that instead of beginning with behaviorism or any other psychology, he begins with six texts which exemplify poetic language. His first example, a description of a steamship in Pidgin English, is used to show the relationship between language and knowledge: “Thlee-piecee bamboo, two piecee puff-puff, walk-along inside, no-can-see” (43). For the South Sea Islander, who speaks pidgin, the words are not poetic. They simply express his concept of the steamship in the words available to him. But for the Englishman, who holds a different concept of the steamship, these words act as poetry. By experiencing the Islander’s concept as expressed in pidgin, the Englishman sees the steamship “in a new and strange light” and broadens his understanding (48–49). The words bring him to a new state of awareness, give him a “felt change of consciousness” (52). Poetic pleasure arises from this knowledge that one is moving from a previous state of awareness to a new, expanded awareness. Although the pleasure is momentary, the knowledge of the new concept that came through pleasure is permanent (57).

This opening example of Poetic Diction implies an evaluation of language that is very high indeed. For Barfield, language is not just the symbolization of referents, but a source of knowledge in itself. He believes that concepts are inseparable from the language in which they are expressed, so that the Englishman who has added the pidgin description of the steamship to his linguistic repertoire has added to his inventory of knowledge. Barfield sees a variety of verbal expressions—synonyms and stylistic flourishes—as eminently valuable because each one provides a different perspective to the referent. (His first book, History in English Words, is a fascinating exploration of this view.) Whereas Barfield seeks the enlargement of language, Ogden and Richards seek to control it and narrow its scope. For example, on the basis of the theory of definition set forth in The Meaning of Meaning, Ogden reduced the vocabulary of Basic English to a mere 850–1000 words, a number he deemed sufficient to symbolize most referents.¹⁰ In the second edition of Poetic Diction (1952), Barfield explicitly criticizes the Ogden-Richards theory, arguing that the distinction between emotive and referential language is fallacious because the very nature of language is metaphorical.

Barfield’s position may be stated in this way: in order to know something, a person must recognize it, and to recognize it, he mu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Context of Metaphor
• 2. The Context of Literary Criticism and Genre
• 3. The Context of Language Control
• 4. The Context of Christian Humanism
• 5. The Context of Myth and History
• Postscript
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index